Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Three in the morning was that time of day I really wished
that I was sleeping when I was on night shift. I can remember so many nights
looking at the clock and knowing how great it would be to be in my own bed and
sleeping. So at three this morning I wake up and cannot go back to sleep.
Lilith Anne senses that I am awake and she slips off the bed and into the
darkness. A few seconds later she’s scratching at the door to be let out. Sigh.
I get up and let all the dogs out, but Tyger Linn stays put; she’s had all the
dark nights in the woods that she wants and she will sit this out, thank you
very much for asking begone now.

The Cousins go with her, Queen of All the Packs that she is,
but they return sooner than she does. I’ve left the back doors open and as I am
trying to get back to sleep I am also listening for the Coyotes. They were here
last night, very early in the morning, and I have no idea why, but it is their
woods. Lilith alone isn’t a good thing if they’re around but I am certain the
Cousins would stay out with Lilith if they scented the Coyotes. All of this is
floating around in my head as I drift towards and away from sleep. There is the
familiar noise of the doggie door to the porch and I count snores; two on the
floor and one on the bed. Lilith has returned.

Unlike Tyger Linn, who assumes both the sofa and the bed
were installed in the house for her convenience, Lilith will not get up on the
bed without asking. If I’m asleep, she’ll lie down on the floor rather than
jump up without permission. I put a hand out and Lilith nuzzles it, and I tell
her to come on up. Quick and silent, a sixty-five pound canine hits the right
spots without undue fuss or landing on body parts, and within a minute Lilith
is snoring, too.

With the back door open I can feel the fog move in. It’s a
warm wet feeling that also brings a chill as the moisture causes the
temperature to drop. Tyger Linn wakes up and recurls herself in a tighter
striped ball, snugging to me for warmth. I hear no owls, no Coyotes, no sounds
in the night but that of the fog slipping in between the branches of the trees
and moving over the ground and the roof. It’s the same sound a river makes late
at night, the mass of water over the Earth underneath it, water on water on
water, on Earth, and now we’re the river bed, still not sleeping, but listening
and feeling the water as it moves over us. We’re the bottom dwellers now, in
the dark and mysterious place, with deadheads and limbs waiting to snag the
unwary line. Navigation here is wicked, at best, for there are many obstacles
for the bottom of any craft to hang. No nets could bring forth a bounty from
this body of water for there are giant plants that live on the bottom which
would eat any net cast here. Long lines might snag, too, so there is safety for
those of us who live in the crannies and crevices of the house, under the
protection of the trees.

I hear traffic in the distance, a lonely truck slowly making
its way through the darkness and the river of fog. There are deer out there, I
know there are, and the driver of the truck knows it, too. Not too many animals
move around at night when there’s the flood of the fog, but there’s always some
animal that gets spooked or is curious or just wants to move, like Lilith did
just a few minutes ago. I count snores and there are four. The sound of the
truck disappears into the early morning darkness and I listen for more. Soon
traffic will pick up and instead of there being one or two vehicles there will
be a half dozen or so. That’s heavy traffic out here, mind you.

Tyger’s head comes up as a branch falls somewhere in the
woods. She tenses, waits, listens, and the Cousins get up and mill around. As
long as Lilith Anne stays down they’ll stay in. If Lilith launches then it’s
on. But the Queen stirs not at all for a random noise in the night. Somewhere
out there, actually in the kitchen, is coffee, and my mind begins to crave it.
If I even so much as sit up everyone in the room will think it’s breakfast
time, so I debate; coffee or more attempts at pretending to sleep?

Coffee.

Once there is food in bowls and less of a riot in the house,
I sit on the porch steps and listen to the fog. There is the sound of a light
falling rain, and there is the sound of the drops of water that are easing off
the roof, and there are the sounds of cars and trucks in the distance now. But
the fog has settled over Hickory Head like an ocean, with currents and waves
and eddies and I can hear it with my soul. Here is something vast and
immeasurable, yet it is also transient and ethereal. I can hear the sounds it
makes between the trees and the noise that it makes as it slowly flows across
the fields. It scraps across the surface of the pond and it crashes into the
trees on the banks, and it roils in treetops and it swirls in front of me as if
asking me to dance.

My eyes are closed as I breathe in this fog, this river,
this ocean, this air, this water, this breath. Coffee is the defibrillator, the
hook that hauls me out of the dream world completely, and drops me hard on the
reality of hard land and clothes again. I have to drive through the fog in an
hour, and hope it doesn’t kill me.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

I grew up taking trips to the beach two or three times a
year, and we went up to North Georgia to see the leaves a couple of times. I
wanted to see Rome, always did, even as a kid. And I had gone to New York City
twice. There was a bit of a wanderer in me and I always assumed that I would go
to Mexico one day, and Canada, too. When the Stubs came it didn’t dent my
dreams, at first, and I remember being at the beach one weekend with some
friends and we sat on the sand and talked about what the Stubs meant and where they
might have come from. Gas has spiked up a quarter a gallon but we got that when
a hurricane hit anywhere within five hundred miles of the Gulf. I was just
fifteen at that time, and there was no sign at all that the end was near, or
even remotely close. We drove back and I remember listening to the radio and
hearing about a Stub that killed a man in Boston, in broad daylight. He was the
one hundredth victim in the United States, and that didn’t crack the top ten
causes of death, not by a wide margin.

We took turns driving to school when gas hit three bucks a
gallon. I hated the fact that I had worked my ass off all my life to be able to
buy a truck and then gas went up on me as soon as I turned sixteen. But we
could still get pot pretty cheap, and there was a sense of excitement that
there was something going on that was dangerous and unknown. There was even
talk about renaming our school team to the “Stubs” but teachers and parents
thought it was in poor taste. We kept up with people on FB that did videos of
attacks and there were a lot of fake ones out there, too. It was like watching
the water rise in a boat and laughing as the rats jumped out into the ocean.
The first wave of Stubs really didn’t make that big of a mark on humanity and
it took a while to realize that shooting them was making things a lot worse.

The second wave hit about the time I graduated from High
School. I was leaning towards joining the military after school because making
a living in Brooks County had gotten hard. It wasn’t really hard or even to the
point people were talking about the end, but the Stubs were here and the
Crystal Cough came with them, and people were dying. It had taken this long to
figure out we weren’t killing them when they disappeared and that news was the
first piece of information that really jolted people. We weren’t killing them
we were spreading them. That was a shock. The fact that we had spent four years
making things worse hit everyone’s morale. It wasn’t funny at all anymore and
it was like everyone woke up on the same day and started wondering what we were
going to do.

News came out on the internet, and a lot of news came out on
the internet that turned out to be totally weird stuff made up from nothing,
that the Stubs had arrived from outer space, and that they were encased in
shells that melted in the atmosphere. Four years ago we had gone through a
small cloud of them, and when they hit Earth they started feeding. Well, there
was some guy in Sweden who was saying there was a much larger cloud of them,
and we were heading right for it, and if we didn’t find a way to knock them out
of the way or destroy them we were going to be knee deep in these things in
three months. The first true global effort to solve a problem went into high gear,
and who knows, maybe they got enough of the incoming Stubs to save us, but we’ll
never know. We stood in the middle of town with all the lights turned off and
watched as thousands of streaks of light streamed towards Earth. We were
screwed and everyone knew it.

They rained down from the sky for three days. They were
barely visible in the daytime and at night it was hard to tell where they were
going to land. But the sound they made was unmistakable and when one landed
within a mile or so you could feel it. I remember counting them, two or three
every hour, for three days. You are thinking right now that doesn’t sound that
bad but they landed everywhere and we couldn’t kill them and they fed on us.
They fed on everything they could put in their mouths; cows, horses, pigs,
dogs, cats, and anything made of meat. They walked through fences like they
weren’t there. They stopped heavy trucks when they got hit by them. They walked
through fire and they would walk into a creek on one side and come out of the
other.

A year after the Second Wave, there was no real contact from
the outside world except from radio, and an occasional satellite transmission
on the internet. It was the same everywhere. In big cities things were so bad
that the Russians nuked some of their own towns to see if that would kill the
Stubs, but even that made things worse, much worse, but almost everything that
anyone did made things worse.

The second year was bad, but it wasn’t the end yet. We were
still growing food, we still had a doctor, there was still some fuel, and there
were still supplies coming in, about once a week or so, and the government was
still telling everyone everything was going to get better. We were still seeing
the air force out every once in a while, but it was getting dangerous to be out
after dark. We heard from the radio there were riots and mobs out killing
people and there were places that were on fire from looters.

The third year after the Second Wave we knew all we had was
what we could see in front of us. My parents died early in the year, and the
kids were killed a few months later. Kim was killed a month after that, and I
really didn’t think any of us would be alive for much longer.

The fourth year came as we lived like rats, running hard
from one place to another, everyone helping each other as they could, but we
were running out of everything. In a town of five thousand people there was a
good three hundred of us left. When some stranger named Bill Bergstrom called a
meeting most people went simply because there wasn’t anything left to do. This
is the story of what happened after that meeting, and what we did to try to
save the human race from extinction.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Sunday, December 10, 2017

You never really think about sound until its quiet. We got
up on the roof one night and listened to the night and there was so much of
what we had gotten used to that was gone. It was easy to get used to the dark
because the sky was an amazing thing now that there were no lights at all. The
stars seemed closer and bunched together and the Milky Way spread out over the
sky like a river. If the Stubs had come from somewhere out there it was hard to
imagine there wouldn’t be something better or worse or different or anything.
Everything seemed possible with a sky that full at night.

Roof top watching was a big thing. People brought sleeping
bags up there when it was nice weather and we had to be careful of the roof.
But sometimes, when it was really cold, and there was no one up there but Berg
and me, and later, Reba and me, I could almost hear the sound of her heartbeat
it would get so still. There were no human sounds at all anymore; no traffic,
no planes, no factories, no trains, no metal against metal sounds or the sound
of anybody playing music anywhere. It would make a person nearly deaf the
silence was so big and so intense. Without a lot of background noise to clutter
things up so much, we discovered that sometimes we would be whispering because
regular conversation seemed so terribly loud.

Sometimes, in the school, when we were all just scattered
out on the floor on mats and sleeping bags, and cots, it was easier to fall
asleep with the noise of other people in the room, yawning, turning, snoring,
coughing, than it was to sleep when we made apartments and brought in beds. It
was easy to hear two people making love, no matter how quiet they tried to be,
but no one complained about it, until some of the younger couple got too loud
with it, but still, it was good to hear anything at all.

At the same time, one of the few animals that seemed to have
gotten off scot free were the birds. When the cats were gone the bird started
coming back. When people started disappearing birds seemed to thrive like we
had never suspected they might. During the springtime it was downright loud
there were so many birds singing. We knew there were a lot more fish, and we
knew there was a hell of a lot more beavers. But fishing was something that was
more dangerous than anything else a person could do because it required a
certain state of mind, and so did watching your back.

And things were getting overrun with weeds and brush. Trails
disappeared and even roads began to be erased by rain and lack of attention.
Folk that swore they would never live in town had to move because getting to
and from the country got to be impossible in some cases. By the time we decided
to abandon the town and all move out to the old school, there were a lot of
mail routes that didn’t exist. The hurricane that hit in 2017, Irma, flooded
the hell out of a lot of roads and knocked down a mess of trees. We were all at
the school and it hammered our fence line hard, but we got it all back up in a
day. But you think about the rest of the area at the time. Every house that got
a tree landing on it hard was gone forever. And we realized a lot of things
would be gone forever. If you broke a pair of fingernail clippers you sure
didn’t want to borrow any but the store room cost time to get things out of it
with a one hour minimum. We gave up on plastics as much as we could and we
tried to make our own when we could, and when we had to, and we did have to
more than you would think.

But that’s another thing. When you sit on a roof top
listening to the sky and your heart you lose a lot of the stuff in your head
that was going on and on. Songs didn’t get stuck in a mind like they would back
when, and there were a lot fewer things that belonged to one person. Everything
you owned could be worn on your back, mostly, because nothing else fit into
what we were trying to do, and that was survive.

And that was something else, too. Back before, I owned a
nice truck and a nice house, neither were grand or expensive but I felt proud
of what I had in life. Now, all of that was gone. I felt proud of my life in a
different way. I could look down a row of soy beans and see that it rows were
clear and clean of weeds, and that felt good. I looked up at the windmill
pumping water and that felt good, too. I was tired, dead tired most days, and
that felt good. We had food enough, even if it was the same things over and
there was no meat, but I felt like we would survive, whatever that meant, and
that we would be able to build back something, one day.

It’s hard to describe the world that was because even as we
looked back at it, the memories were diluted and became harder to taste. We
would sit around the supper table and talk about things that existed that some
of the younger people never saw, and would never see, and we realized that we
were speaking a foreign language to them, like when my grandfather spoke of
Viet Nam or the days when gasoline was less than a dollar. But these young
people knew of gasoline as something rare and precious, and fleeting. An eight
year old might have never traveled in a car any further than Valdosta, which
was twenty miles away. A five year old might have never seen a banana. There
were teenagers who had never graduated from High School, and would never
graduate, and who would never see a prom, or a football game. There were
children who were amazed by electric lights and running water, because it took
us over a year to get them both back on a daily basis. No one owned their own
refrigerator or their own kitchen, even of the cabins did have them, there were
only a few of them. There were no more wrist watches and no more cell phones.
There were no more key rings for there were nothing with a lock on it anymore,
except the armory. I’m willing to bet one hundred percent of the men were
carrying a wallet on the first day we moved in and more than willing to bet no
one had one after three months. Gone was the need for license or insurance
cards, or for that matter, money. Everyone carried a pocket knife these days,
and nearly everyone wore a hat, even the women. Gloves were in demand and the
need for someone to learn how to make gloves out of rough cloth became an
obsession. Trash bags disappeared after a while because there wasn’t anything
to throw away anymore.

Rats and mice flourished for the first few months because
they were too small to be noticed by the Stubs, but the owls and hawks soon
began to catch up with them. It took some folks a while to get used to the idea
of letting rat snakes live, but one rat could ruin a week’s worth of food, and
many hours of hard labor, overnight. People got used to snakes eating rats and
mice and people got used to eating rats and mice, if they wanted any meat at
all. Mostly, people got used to not eating meat. There really wasn’t a choice.

One night we were on the roof in sleeping bags and it was
cold, really cold, but it was one of the few places Reba and I felt truly
alone. We sat up and watched the lunar eclipse, and it was a surprise to us,
because these things were predictable before the Stubs came. Now it was simply
beautiful, and wonderful, and it was awful, too, because I realized there was
so much knowledge that the human race might never regain. Thousands of years
ago, Chinese astronomers could predict eclipses with incredible accuracy and
now one had snuck up on us. Would we humans ever rebuild? Would we be smarter
this time? None of that matter right now because we had crops to harvest and
rats to kill. We had to feed ourselves first, and I feared that before I died I
would live to see humanity slip back into a deep state of ignorance.

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About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.